Windows and windshields for vehicles such as road vehicles, aircraft, and ships, and buildings such as homes, public buildings and garages are often provided with roller shades for the purpose of shielding the sunbeam and/or preventing the view from outside. Also, a cover may be provided between the passenger compartment and the luggage compartment of a vehicle as a partition. Covering the luggage compartment of a vehicle is preferable to the end of discouraging theft.
A typical roller shade comprises a spring-loaded retractor attached to a lower end of an opening such as a rear windshield, an opaque or semi-transparent screen sheet having a trailing edge attached to the retractor, and a rod member attached to the leading edge of the screen sheet. The screen sheet is normally wound around the retractor, and can be paid out from the retractor by pulling out the rod member away from the retractor. Typically, the rod member may be hooked or otherwise secured to an upper end of the opening with the screen sheet in its fully extended condition. When the rod member is disengaged from the upper end of the opening, the screen sheet is retracted and wound around the retractor by a spring incorporated therein.
Such roller shades have been widely used in various applications. However, for functional and aesthetic reasons, windshields, windows and other openings may not be exactly rectangular, but may have circular, semi-circular, elliptic, semi-elliptic, triangular, trapezoidal and other non-rectangular shapes. In such a case, the conventional roller shade is quite inadequate for its purpose because the screen sheet of the conventional roller shade is rectangular in shape, and cannot adapt itself to the change in the width of the opening as the rod member is moved away from the retractor.